Seth and the Practical Power of Feelings

14 Nov Seth and the Practical Power of Feelings

Experience is the product of the mind, the spirit, conscious thoughts and feelings, and unconscious thoughts and feelings. These together form the reality that you know. You are hardly at the mercy of a reality, therefore, that exists apart from yourself, or is thrust upon you.—Seth, The Nature of Personal Reality, Session 609

The fabric of our life is composed of certain continuous strands of thoughts and beliefs homogenized into a feeling pat­tern. That feeling pattern is our emotional attitude toward our­selves and life in general, and it governs the large areas of our ex­perience. Our feel­ing pattern becomes the active backdrop for our daily life’s events, and our individual beliefs and emotions become the stars that shine against that backdrop. But the backdrop de­termines the overall picture of where we’re headed in life, and so it must be considered as a major player in the creation of our reality.

For instance, some people may have strong, supportive feel­ings about their ability to be successful in life because they believe they make their own luck or can manipulate circumstances to their lik­ing. They feel confident that little can be done to stop their for­ward movement because they can handle anything that comes their way. They see themselves as emotionally strong and gener­ally fit. Overall, they have a healthy attitude toward themselves and others, and an optimistic overview of life.

That attitude becomes the stage for their life events. An illness hits, seemingly from out of the blue, but it won’t keep these people derailed for long because they have this wonderful undercurrent of feeling pattern that all will work to their advantage in the end. They may get fired one fine day and hit the depths of depres­sion—but not for long. Soon they will rise to the occasion by al­lowing their ingrained feeling pattern to kick in and move them be­yond the pain.

So, from a metaphysical viewpoint we know these people cre­ated their illnesses due to their beliefs and they got fired due to their beliefs. We also know they pulled themselves out of both pits due to their stronger beliefs in their overall abilities. Both kinds of be­liefs must be understood and recognized when we start con­sciously creating our experience.

I know a man who missed that point, and it was his undoing. He worked with conscious creation for years, but he never saw the bigger picture of his life. He analyzed the beliefs that caused him to become ill or broke or hurt. But he never realized that his over­all feeling pattern was incredibly pessimistic. In fact, he never would have applied those words to himself if backed into a cor­ner. He saw himself as rational, logical, coping with what life dealt him to the best of his ability.

But under it all, he looked for the worst to happen. If a minor unsettling event occurred, he dwelled on it, projecting its effects into the future via his feeling pattern about life in general, and therefore compounded the problem—and verified the beliefs behind his feeling pattern. This went on year after year, wearing him down until he decided not to go on any longer. Finally he simply gave up and died. It just wasn’t worth the effort to continue when he could not seem to break the depressing cycle of haphazard con­struc­tions, or so I deduced.

Fortunately not all beliefs are rock-solid. They flow with the feeling of the moment; they change when we’re up, or change when we’re down. Say we’re really excited about something, imbued with a zest for life, then our belief in personal vulnerability may be put on the back burner as we sail through events that at other times would have had us biting our nails to the quick. This feeling of zest can become part of our feeling pattern if we culti­vate it. Then it automatically sets the mood for our days—and by default creates our life along its defined lines. It becomes part of our phi­losophy toward life, and by its nature exerts a tremendous force in shaping our future.

Does it not behoove us then to take a closer look at what runs through our minds all day long, or what long-term attitudes and feelings we’ve held without ever questioning their value? You bet. And that brings up an important point, one with which many psycholo­gists don’t agree, thanks mostly to Freud. Beliefs are al­ways found in the conscious mind. We don’t have to fear a subcon­scious attack from beyond rational thought, or years of psycho­analysis to dredge them up to the surface. According to Seth, be­liefs ride the waves of conscious thought constantly.

Our problem usually is that because our beliefs have become assump­tions to us, they are never questioned and therefore never recog­nized as beliefs. It’s similar to posting a note to yourself on your bathroom mirror, perhaps something inspirational that you want to remember frequently. How many days go by before you fail to see the note, so cleverly has your mind relegated it to back­ground mode? It’s the same with your beliefs.

Just don’t lose track of the fact that the conscious mind is a mighty tool, there for the using. It may need taming and training, but that’s about it. The conscious mind is well equipped to see its own beliefs, reflect upon them and study their results as they de­velop in our physical world. So using this tool, the mind, as it was meant to be used would automatically help us recognize both our beliefs and their effects. Then we could evaluate their validity and whether or not we wish to continue in the direction they automati­cally set for us.